Saturday, April 1, 2017

The Dino Melaye Distraction and School Pride

Although Senator Dino Melaye is certainly not in the good
graces of Aso Rock, the president’s handlers must be thanking Melaye for the week-long
media circus he instigated, which gave the president some reprieve.

I am already sick and tired of being sick and tired
(apologies to late African-American civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer) of
the Dino Melaye ABU graduation controversy. But let me say this one last thing
before I filter out Dino Melaye from my discursive radar.

The most gracious thing that can be said about ABU VC
Ibrahim Garba's testimony before the Senate Ethics Committee is that it raises
more questions than answers. If Melaye indeed graduated from ABU with a Third
Class BA degree in Geography in 2000, why was his name missing from the
graduation list for that year? Was his name omitted because of clerical
oversight? I am aware of several legitimate graduates whose names didn’t make
it to the final graduation list. Was that the case for Melaye? Was the VC misled by his staff? Or did he
knowingly lie under oath, which would be perjury? We need answers to these
queries to get closure on the issue.

Nonetheless, people who are obsessing over the apparent
discrepancy between Melaye's description of his NYSC cohort as "ABU 1999
set" and his putative year of graduation in 2000 fail to realize that
because of unceasing ASUU strikes in the 1990s, there was (and still is) a
jarring asymmetry between the official numeric labels assigned to academic
cohorts and actual years of graduation.

For instance, the numeric label assigned to my graduating
cohort at BUK was “1995/1996.” (The graduating cohort ahead of us graduated in
1995, and their official numeric label was “1994/1995.”) Were it not for an ASUU
strike, we should have graduated in 1996, but our final session dragged on till
early 1997. So, while my official BUK transcript reads "1995/1996"
session, my degree certificate has a 1997 date. Technically, members of my
cohort belong to the “BUK 1996 set," even though our actual year of
graduation is 1997.

I see parallels between my experience and Melaye’s—if he
indeed graduated from ABU. Melaye was admitted, I think, in the 1993/1994
session, so the numeric label for his graduating cohort would be 1998/1999--if
you account for the lost year at ABU. Plus, NYSC discharge certificates always
bear the numeric label of one’s graduating cohort. Although I did my NYSC in
1997, the call-up number in my discharge certificate has “1996” in it. It
didn’t mean I “served” before I graduated.

So people who use the chronological asymmetry between the
year indicated in Melaye’s NYSC call-up number (1999) and his putative year of
graduation (2000) as a basis to impeach the credibility of his claims haven’t
paid any attention to the turbulence in the Nigerian university system in the
1990s and the early 2000s. Nobody who graduated from a Nigerian public
university from the mid to late 1990s is different from Melaye.

School pride and
vainglory

I met Dino Melaye first in, I think, 1999 when I worked with
the Weekly Trust Newspaper, then
headquartered in Kaduna. He came with a bunch of other students from ABU to our
newsroom and asked to be interviewed over something I don’t recall now. He
immediately struck me as an insufferably attention-seeking boor. My
recollection is that we refused to assign anybody to interview him.

I can’t speak to whether or not he actually graduated from
ABU, but I’ve been struck by the frenetic social media chatter that his
troubles with the media have inspired. It both conduced to the denigration of
ABU by non-ABU graduates and to the activation of defensive institutional pride
and self-congratulation by ABU alumni.

Here is my take. I have no problem with ABU’s smug,
hyperbolic, and self-congratulatory bumper-sticker slogan that says "An
ABU graduate is ahead of you naturally," which got played up a lot in the
aftermath of the Melaye debacle. For me, it’s cheeky, good-natured humor. Of
course, anyone with even the slightest pretense to education knows that
people’s cognitive worth is never measured by the name of the institution they
attended. And, as many people have pointed out, there is frankly no difference
whatsoever in the quality of education offered by all Nigerian universities.

I have read people talk of the bygone “glories” ABU and
other first-generation Nigerian universities. That’s simply not true. There
were just as many smart people then as there are now—just like there were as
many dumb people then as there are now. It is unreflective chronocentric
narcissism that causes people to denigrate the present and valorize a putative
glorious past. Have you interacted with 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s Nigerian
university graduates? If you haven’t, they are our ministers, senators,
lecturers, etc. They are as many gifted people among them as there are obtuse
people among them—just like now.

I have interacted with graduates from all generations of
Nigerian universities and found no difference in the quality of their minds as
a consequence of their age, years of graduation, years of establishment of
their schools, etc. Your year of graduation, the school you graduated from,
your ethnicity, your region, etc. have little or no influence on your
intellectual worth.

Dino Melaye would still be the buffoonish, air-headed thug
that he is irrespective of the university he attended—and what year he
graduated.

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). He also writes two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust).

In April 2014 Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.